Back at the beginning of March I asked "has Microsoft got BPM?". At that time I hadn't had the opportunity to get a briefing from Microsoft on its recent BPM moves, but now I have.

So—has Microsoft got BPM? Yes and no.

Microsoft is not about to become a fully-fledged BPM solution provider. Rather, Microsoft is attempting to do to BPM what it attempts to do in all the areas of enterprise software it's played in (think DBMSs, development tools, middleware, portals, etc etc)—commoditise the core technology and make it part of an integrated software platform that's digestible by mainstream medium-to-large enterprises. Sun wasn't the first company to realise that "volume drives value"—it's taken a leaf out of Microsoft's book.

So a big part of the focus is on providing the technology foundation for BPM. Here Microsoft has a couple of formidable weapons:

1. Office. Office is the defacto productivity suite in enterprises—and with Office 2007, is becoming the front end infrastructure for BPM scenarios in Microsoft's world, as well as a suite of apps. It's an environment very familiar to business people, so if those people are looking to get a BPM initiative started, Microsoft's proposition could look pretty attractive. [If you don't believe us about Office, see this research from our partner Freeform Dynamics.]
2. Workflow Foundation. This is a core component of .NET 3.0 (the native programming model for Longhorn Server and Vista). It provides embeddable workflow execution services for both highly structured business process automation scenarios and less structured, collaborative scenarios. It's becoming the foundation of both BizTalk Server 2006 (which will drive structured process automation scenarios) and Sharepoint 2007 (which is more suited to unstructured, collaboration-focused processess). Workflow Foundation really is neat.

The big caveat, of course, is that all these weapons only really come into play if and when organisations buy into the current tranche of product releases—Office 2007, BizTalk 2006, Visual Studio "Orcas" and the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO), and .NET 3.0.

Although all these pieces are either released or coming very soon, where customers have a significant investment in Microsoft in these kinds of areas, it's far from certain that they will upgrade or migrate quickly. Microsoft's success in engineering an integrated platform of software infrastructure is also a weakness, in other words—people who buy into it tend to have a lot of capabilities riding on it. That drives caution and risk aversion.

Microsoft's BPM foundation is mainly focused on the development and deployment of processes, and although BizTalk 2006 has some BAM capabilities (through integration with SQLServer OLAP and BI functionality) Microsoft isn't focusing primarily on providing tools for modelling and simulating, analysing or optimising processes. It's developed a coterie of "Business Process Alliance" partners to fill in the gaps, and also to help it accelerate demand for the new versions of its key BPM foundation components. When it comes to Workflow Foundation in particular, the huge Microsoft-focused packaged application vendor (ISV) community which so effectively drove adoption of SQLServer will also be a key element of Microsoft's strategy.

So on paper Microsoft has a good BPM story—if you're prepared to put a lot of skin in Microsoft's game and if you're prepared to upgrade to the latest Microsoft infrastructure. The company isn't yet pushing the base technologies aggressively and directly to customers, but it is priming its partners and channels and these will drive uptake.

Another interesting angle to the technology piece of this story is the recently announced BizTalk Services offering—a set of integration capabilities "in the cloud" which offer a hosted complement to on-premise BizTalk integration implementations. These services are designed to, in theory (it's early days), make the creation of highly federated, distributed service and process networks much more simple to develop and operate. It's a fascinating development that has some parallels with what Salesforce has been doing with the Salesforce Platform Edition, and (a little less so) with what BT is attempting to do with BT Integrate.

One last small thing though. If it's serious about BPM, at some point Microsoft's going to have to sort out the difference between this BPM and this BPM...